Who’s Afraid of Totoro?

It is a misunderstood culture. You will never find a more wretched hive of body odor and social awkwardness than at the conventions. The clubs are the toddler-fenced play space for would-be autocrats. Every fan seems to be wearing a garish costume and haphazardly tossing foreign words into his speech (fitting the pronoun, the fans are predominately male). America has embraced Comic-Con; that is, sexy people like Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron can go there without having to fear anything more than adoring fans, let alone social disgrace. But will we embrace anime? And why should we?

Hayao Miyazaki recently retired from making feature films. The goal here is to persuade you to care, if you don’t already, but first to try to determine why you might not care at the moment.

Miyazaki-san is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, which is, in essence, the Pixar of East Asia (so Pixar-like…